The Sub
by EmmaBlack202
Summary: Prof. Binns is out...sick? Marauders go to class anyways.


"Ugh, I hate Professor Binns's class! He's such a didactic, stoic, inattentive teacher. He doesn't even know he's dead!" Sirius promulgated as he, James, and Remus left the Great Hall and began to climb the stairs towards their next class.

"Well," James began, contriving a prank, "we could always let him figure out that he's a ghost. We, being compassionate students, would light a fire in the classroom, with all the windows and doors closed…"

"No," Remus repudiated the idea before it was truly formed and began to expostulate with James. "We are not making the room so fuliginous that no one can breathe and we all die except Binns because he's already dead." He rolled his eyes at James as they reached the top of the stairs.

"Fine; we can start a duel and 'accidentally' hex him and it'll go through him..."

"No, James; it would be preposterous and grievous to cause him semi-bodily harm."

"If you're going to give a remonstrance to all of James's ideas, you could at least offer an idea yourself," a vexed Sirius snapped. As they turned the corner, a crowd of prattling students came out of a classroom to the right, the obsequious sycophants trailing behind the rest almost hanging off their paragon of a teacher. The students broke the small kin of three apart, Sirius and James moving to the left, Remus to the right, almost running into a sentinel in the process. As they passed, the Remus rejoined the other two as they continued walking.

"I would not deprecate a prank that didn't render our dogma destitute and put the other teachers in a distemper that would be deleterious to us during dinner, because if you are delirious enough to believe that the consequences would not be propagated to the school, allow me to disabuse you now. I can discern the censure McGonagall gives us every time I look at her." Remus hyperbolized slightly, using the alliteration that only occurs when he is truly stressed.

Sirius looked at his friend. "While I understand the plight your affliction causes, as I would surmise that is the reason from your edginess, I would beseech you to not castigate us while the timorous first years are passing; they are rather impressionable, you see." He pointed his thumb behind him as the last of the plebeian class started down the stairs. Remus tittered slightly as a slight blush rose in his cheeks.

"Right; where were we before I scared the first-years?" Remus asked, slightly unnerved.

"You were shooing down James's shoddy pranks." Sirius supplied, immediately offering yet another loathsome prank idea. They reached the classroom door and stood with their fellow students, some of whom were importuning the smart kids for last-minute help on the homework.

James, however, had lost track of his friends' conversation almost instantaneously after stopping; he had spotted Lily Evans. James looked back at his friends once before continuing his epic quest of the girl, though he did believe he had made some progress; they were at least friends now and she no longer tried to maim him if he called her 'Lily'. James felt that this was a good time to try his suit again. Gathering up his gumption, trying to be as winsome as possible, he walked over to her, "Hey, Lily."

"Hey, James," She smiled. She was glad he was no longer a bombastic encumbrance and had made reparations to several of his past victims; she rather enjoyed having him as a friend ("or more," as her friends would say. She always reproached them on the "adulteration," though secretly she liked the addition to their narrative.) "What's up?"

"The usual," James shrugged, "homework, prodigious pranks, Hogsmead trips. When is the next one; do you know?" he beguiled. In the past, by this point in the conversation he would have destroyed the genial atmosphere surrounding them and begin to make strange, phonetic, lecherous half-sentences in his attempt to woo her. She would retaliate in kind by maligning, vehemently, about his wanton behavior, ignoble personality, and inculcate to him that he was the worst, most odious vexation in her life. Today, however, he seemed to have been given a reprisal.

"It's next Saturday, isn't it? It must be; there's not a palpable tension in the air like there always is before a trip. I love the trips, but not the days before. Everyone's always antsy. Then when you try to be sedulous and do homework everyone else is full of dalliance and doesn't want to be anything but an impediment to a working environment."

"Yeah," James agreed, "but on Sunday morning, when everyone is asleep until two, it's so nice to fly to the other side of the lake and watch the sunrise. There's this ingenuous moment, just before the sunrises, when all the obscure, contentious problems of the world fade away. It's an ineffable sight to behold, really." James finished, returning from the blithe place where he had been. He began to ruminate on what he had just revealed and began to languish; he hadn't meant to sound so sappy. Lily, on the other hand was intrigued.

"You wake up early, on Sunday morning, to pay homage to the sunrise? I don't think I've ever seen a sunrise at Hogwarts," she added as an afterthought. "I used to see them all the time with my dad; we'd go camping in pastoral areas. There was always a soft, melodious song in the background from the birds. I bet it's lovely on the other side of the lake." She never speculated that James would have such a ritual and gave deference to the "ever-growing paradox," as his epithet was quickly becoming.

James, who was quick to stow his thoughts, mused that the conversation was quite risible, could not believe his ears; he stared at her visage and could discern her sincerity. He thought it ironic that he had incurred six long, lamentable years for nothing; him being his quirky self would suffice for her. "Well, if you'd like, you can come with me this Sunday."

"Really?" Lily's face was luminous with alacrity. "Thank you; yes, I'd love to." She began to feel, again, a want to redress all their shouting matches from over the years.

James was in rapture; after habituating himself to rejection, he finally procured a "yes" from the one, Lily Evans.

"Hey, guys. What are we talking about?" Sirius interrupted. He had thought the conversation a trifle, greatly understating the iniquity he inflicted on the transient moment.

"Hello, Sirius," Lily replied. Although her schism with James had cleared up, she still had not forgiven Sirius for the pyre-like explosion he had engendered during their detention together. The room had been sooty for days afterwards, and Remus had not yet convinced Sirius to recompense her for it. Whatever else he may be, Lily was reverent of how quickly Sirius had gotten the sustenance to become combustible, conjure a fire, how holistic the fire had been, and how much collateral damage it had caused.

"I have heard a rumor from none other than the virtuous Alice Hareing that Binns is not here today. I do hope he is not wan if he is here."

"Sirius he's ghost," James pointed out. He thought his friend may have been alluding to a prank, but seemed unlikely; Alice appeared to vouch for his story.

"It's true!" she exclaimed, her ponytail bobbing behind her as she scurried through her classmates. "The current conjecture is that he actually died!" As the words left her lips, however, the capricious class had changed its mind again and, true, if they listened closely to others' conversations it seemed the class's infirmity was its affluence of possibilities about what had happened to their teacher: he withered away to nothingness, the Valiant Sir Nick had challenged him to a duel and he had lost his head, he was helping St. Mungo's create a new commodity (some type of balm). Each person in the class seemed to help edify and embellish the story so much that it seemed more expedient to simply make something up and call it true. The noise had risen well passed a temperate level and many almost missed that a short, spiked haired woman had opened the door to the classroom.

"Good Morning, seventh years."

The class started at the cordial salutation; they had never before met this teacher. Immediately, they all spouted questions at once.

"Where's Professor Binns—"

"He's not actually dead—"

"Do we have to do the homework—"

"While I am sure," she called over the noise—the shouts of thirty students reverberating off the stone walls—to the students, "that you are all very concerned about Professor Binns, let me assure you that no lamentable, convulsive disease has befallen him. I expect he will be back in class in a few days." The students gave an incoherent uproar at the news—shouts of glee, shouts of indignation, and random acts of folly.

"So much for our prank," Sirius turned to James amidst their classmates' celebrations, ignoring a nervous Lily—"What Prank?"—in the process.

Remus, the only stolid student in the quickly-filling classroom—indeed, many of his peers thought him completely stoic at times—asked the question on everyone's mind. "Ex—excuse me. I don't wish to be rude, but—who are you?" His heightened senses from the proximity of the full moon did not appreciate this arbitrary change in routine.

"Oh, right. A proper introduction may be nice. My name is Montooth—Dr. Montooth. Almost," she added as an afterthought. "I'm going to be your teacher for the next few days. Now, I understand that it would be presumptuous to walk into your class and assume I know exactly what you all have been studying—"

The door burst open and in flew an out-of-breath brown haired girl. "Sorry, Ms. Montooth. The obnoxious little kids—the second and third years—decided to have their conversation in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs of the only staircase that leads up here." She walked to the front of the room, lavished scholar dollars on Ms. Montooth's desk, and took her seat.


End file.
